


Bring Me Down

by StaticPhantom



Series: Paradise Motel Week (Killjoynest) [6]
Category: Danger Days: The True Lives of the Fabulous Killjoys - My Chemical Romance (Album), The True Lives of the Fabulous Killjoys (Comic)
Genre: Blood and Injury, Fighting, Guns, Injury, M/M, Power Siblings, Radio transmissions keep people alive, blood mention, paradise motel week
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-20
Updated: 2020-09-20
Packaged: 2021-03-07 21:08:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,924
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26564122
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/StaticPhantom/pseuds/StaticPhantom
Summary: Prompt Day 6: Radio CrewNewsie always thought that if anyone almost killed her brother, it would be a 'Crow. The alternative was so much worse.
Relationships: Agent Cherri Cola & NewsAGoGo (Danger Days), Agent Cherri Cola/Kobra Kid (Danger Days)
Series: Paradise Motel Week (Killjoynest) [6]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1925404
Comments: 5
Kudos: 12





	Bring Me Down

It was Newsie’s fault—of that she was completely sure. Cherri could deny it all he liked, but Newsie had put him in this situation and if she couldn’t take back what she had done, she was sure as hell going to make sure her brother didn’t suffer for it.

Witch knew that Cherri hated firefights. He was a damn good shot, but if the two ever found themselves in a clap he was too shaken up to leave the station for a few days afterwards. The days were fine- he would sit in the sagging armchair by the window with his miniature sketchbook and whatever pen he could find lying around.

Newsie loved watching her brother draw, his hair pulled up into a small bun so it didn’t block his vision while he sketched characters which only her and Dr. D would ever be allowed to see. Everything would be fine, even if Cherri responded to most questions without looking up from his drawings, replying only in small hums and single words.

The days were fine, Cherri ended up hunched over in the armchair or stared vacantly out of the grimy window until the sun had sunk far below the horizon. When his eyelids overcame his racing head, things became a little less peaceful. Newsie was pretty tolerant of most things- nails on a chalkboard wouldn’t phase her in the slightest, and she reveled in the screaming of hundreds of ‘Joys in the midst of a concert.

There was only one sound which could disturb the unshakeable Newsagogo.

When her brother’s cries had first pierced a peaceful night, Newsie’s blood had run cold and kept her frozen in place. Her heart had pounded in her throat, not quite loud enough to drown out the desperate screams sounding out from only a few feet away.

Every neuron in her brain electrocuted her common sense into reaching out with an involuntary hand and gently resting it on Cherri’s. His hand was clenched into a tight fist and easily tore away from Newsie’s grasp when his body was wracked with gut-wrenching shrieks once again.

“Cherri please,” she whispered, forcing down tears with more determination than she knew existed within her small frame. She began to count her breaths as they grew faster and less certain. Her hands curled into fists of their own and she squeezed her eyes closed, trying to remember anything she knew about nightmares other than the first rule in the fucking book.

Don’t wake him up.

It was no good stopping someone crying out in the night if you payed the price. Nightmares didn’t deal in carbons, they took their payment in panic attacks and dark bruises, and they didn’t care who they stole them from. Newsie had learned this the hard way.

She waited. Every muscle in her body was tensed to keep her from falling to pieces under the crushing pressure of Cherri’s past.

After what felt like years of waiting, the familiar sound of slow, balanced breaths returned to the floor beside Newsie. She forced herself to focus on Cherri’s breathing and tried to relax enough to pull herself out of the fetal position she had unknowingly curled herself into. She held her hands in front of her face, arms outstretched, and waited until her fingers- barely visible in the dark room- had stopped trembling.

Newsie rolled onto her side and reached a tentative hand out to her brother’s arm.

“Cherri?” she called softly, shaking him until his eyes blinked half-open.

“I’ll hold ‘em off, it’s okay,” his voice was scratchy, as though his vocal cords had been torn apart and stuck back together with duct tape.

“Cherri it’s me, Newsie.”

“No, you tell ‘em the news,” defeat ran through his words, accentuated by the gentle tears which dripped slowly onto the jacket which served as his pillow.

“Fuck’s sake Cherri, it’s your sister!” Newsie found her throat clogged with desperation and mucus as she shook him again, more forcefully this time.

Cherri sat up with a start, his heart pounding in his chest. Panic flooded through his veins as he frantically tried to recognize the pitch-black room in which he had woken up, still half-trapped in his memories.

“You okay, Cherri?”

Newsie’s voice echoed in his head, returning him to the present and somewhat calming his buzzing head. He hunched over and pressed his palms into the sides of his head in a futile attempt to rid himself of the voices which forced him to re-live the worst parts of his short past.

“You were… not doin’ so great, I don’t think,” Newsie sat up beside her brother and put her hand over his. She drew it away quickly as his arm tensed up at her touch and cleared her throat instead.

“We don’t have to talk about it if y’ don’t want to. Just- jus’ let me know if there’s anythin’ I can do.”

Cherri nodded slowly, using his sister’s voice as a tether keeping his thoughts focused on the moment at hand.

“Can you just—talk to me f’r a bit?”

“I-yeah. Yeah, I can do that.” Newsie steadied her voice and let words spill from her mouth with no rhyme or reason.

That had been their ritual for the last three years—Newsie would wait until Cherri had stopped crying out for the people he had lost or killed, then she would lie beside him and talk until he let himself drift back to sleep or the sunrise crept into their room and began their day.  
It never hurt any less to hear her brother re-living his lowest points, but at least Newsie knew how to keep him from getting stuck. Even so, she was filled with dread at the prospect of getting caught in a clap, anticipating the horrors Cherri would go through that night.

Today was no different.

They should never have been that close to the City. It wasn’t Scrap Metal’s fault though, they had provided all the equipment for the station back when it was created. 

This was one thing that just couldn’t be transported easily- an antenna big enough that it would feed everyone in the Zones if you filled it to the brim with Power Pup.

“You oughta watch out, Gogo, Cola. There’s a nasty lookin’ patrol headin’ out the City ‘bout ten minutes away.” Scrap had never taken to using Cherri and Newsie’s ‘official’ nicknames. Neither of them minded. Other than Dr. D, they had known Scrap Metal longer than anyone else in the Zone. They even helped Newsie find her Killjoy name. They used to call her ‘Go-go Girl’ on account of her ‘Dancin’ around the place all the fuckin’ time.’

They had warned them. They had told them about the patrol, and despite the look of caution which Cherri shot towards his sister as the sleek white car appeared as a pinprick in the distance, she had kept her eyes fixed on the road ahead.

Cherri Cola knew his sister had one hand wrapped around a ray gun, and he rolled the windows down so they could proceed with a familiar ‘Clap-Avoidance Strategy,’ as Newsie had called it.

It began smoothly, Newsie leaned out of the window and took down three Dracs before they even realized the siblings were there. Cherri kept his eyes locked on the horizon, refusing to let his gaze slip to the still, masked bodies on the ground. Shots sounded out from beside him and two more Dracs went down. The job was done, they were all gone- right?

Being hopeful in the Zones was never a beneficial character trait unless you were using it to push others towards a goal. Cherri knew this, but he still tried to convince himself that the shots he heard after that were just Newsie firing off a victory round. He couldn’t have been more wrong.

A white van, distorted by the heat waves radiating off the tarmac, appeared on the horizon. Cherri’s blood ran cold when he realized that it was being driven directly towards them by a figure in a white smiley face mask.

The few seconds leading up to the firefight were a blur of panic and white outfits in white vans, surrounded by white-orange sand and a white sun overhead, beating down on Cherri’s white skin. Newsie used to call him ‘Vampire Boy’ because he was either horrendously pale or bright red and peeling from sunburn.

Somehow the two had ended up back-to-back, surrounded by a Crow and at least 15 Dracs.

It was handy that they were both such damn good shots, every pulse of energy hit its mark and knocked it down with a short cry. The issue came when the soulless attackers closed in on the pair of rebels, forcing them into an uncomfortable mix of point-blank shooting and messy hand-to-hand combat.

Cherri was wrestling with one of the two remaining Dracs when he heard Newsie scream his name from behind.

He turned his head just as she let out a shot from her gun. He never saw the ‘Crow hit the ground. The blinding pain across the right side of his face was too much to bear standing up, so he crouched to the ground, shaking his head in a futile attempt to rid his ears of the high-pitched ringing which echoed through his skull.

Newsie finished off the other Dracs with a racing heart and horror seeping into every inch of her skin.

“It’s gonna be okay, it’s gonna be okay…” She whispered to herself as she led a stumbling Cherri to the car. Whether she was saying it for her brother or herself, Newsie wasn’t sure.

She booked it to the Station, fear surging through her when Cherri’s eyes began to close and his head hit the car window as he slumped down in his seat. With one hand on the wheel and one eye on the road, Newsie fumbled in her brother’s jacket pockets for the small hand-held radio he carried everywhere. It was on the same frequency it had been yesterday evening, which wasn’t surprising.

Static crackled over the airways as Newsie flipped it on, followed by the noise of distant chanting,

“Paint fight! Paint fight! Paint fight!”

“Ghoul! Shut up a sec, would ya? Cherri’s radioed in.” Kobra’s voice was reassuring, and Newsie would have laughed at the lighthearted wolf whistles from the Diner if the situation hadn’t been so dire.

“Kobra, it’s Newsie. You’re pretty close by th’ station, right?” Kobra was silent for a second, assessing the situation,

“Yeah. Yeah, I can get there in 30 minutes tops, what happened? Is Cherri okay?”

A pang of guilt pulled at Newsie’s chest and unwilling tears blurred her vision of the endless road ahead.

“Fuck. No, I-. We were in a clap, I just need you to get there and tell D, we’ll be there ‘bout twenty minutes after you.”  
Keys jangled together on the other side of the line and a brief, mumbled discussion cut through the static while Newsie waited, her foot pressing the pedal to the floor of the van.

“Yeah, I’m comin’. Can’t stay on the line though, sorry. ‘M takin’ the bike.”

Newsie nodded, “See y’ there.”

“Yeah.”

She looked across at her brother- his face was pale and blood dripped from the side she couldn’t see onto the door handle.

“’S gonna be okay, Cher. You have to be fucking okay.”

This cursed van was too damn slow for Newsie’s liking.

Thank Witch for the Kobra Kid.

**Author's Note:**

> I'm really enjoying this week of prompts and I hope you liked my (unedited, as always) work. This storyline will be continued tomorrow because everyone needs a hug.


End file.
